Nicholas C. Spies, MD

Assistant Professor (Clinical), University of Utah School of Medicine

Specialties

• Clinical pathology
• Informatics and analytics
• Women’s health

Education

• Medical Degree—Washington University School of Medicine
• Internship—Obstetrics and Gynecology, Washington University School of Medicine
• Residency—Clinical Pathology, Chief Resident, Washington University School of Medicine

Certification/Affiliations

• American Board of Pathology (Clinical Pathology)
• Association for Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine
• Association for Pathology Informatics
• Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists
• College of American Pathologists

Research Interests

• Quality assurance and error detection
• Analytics and artificial intelligence

Recent Publications

• Spies NC, Farnsworth CW, Wheeler S, et al. Validating, implementing, and monitoring machine learning solutions in the clinical laboratory safely and effectively. Clin Chem. 2024. Accepted manuscript.
• Morse P, Roberts KF, Spies NC, et al. Process improvement in thyroid fine needle aspiration: standardizing number of smears for enhanced adequacy and diagnosis. Diagn Cytopathol. 2024;52(9):519-523.
• Khonde P, Choudhury S, Spies NC, et al. Worse fibro-inflammatory activity on diagnostic liver biopsy adversely impacts biochemical remission in autoimmune hepatitis. Clin Res Hepatol Gastroenterol. 2024;48(8):102442.
• Spies NC, Farnsworth CW. Impact and frequency of IV fluid contamination on basic metabolic panel results using quality metrics. J Lab Med. 2024;48(1):29-36.
• Spies NC, Hubler Z, Azimi V, et al. Automating the detection of IV fluid contamination using unsupervised machine learning. Clin Chem. 2024;70(2):444-452.
• Spies N, Jackups R, Zaydman M. Anticoagulation management in patients tested for heparin-induced thrombocytopenia in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit diverges from expert guidelines. Am J Clin Pathol. 2023;160(Supplement_1):S139.
• Spies NC, Hubler Z, Roper SM, et al. GPT-4 underperforms experts in detecting IV fluid contamination. J Appl Lab Med. 2023;8(6):1092-1100.
• Yang HS, Pan W, Wang Y, et al. Generalizability of a machine learning model for improving utilization of parathyroid hormone-related peptide testing across multiple clinical centers. Clin Chem. 2023;69(11):1260-1269.
• Hubler ZML, Farnsworth CW, Spies NC. Asymptomatic hyponatremia and hyperkalemia in a patient with leukemic leukocytosis. Clin Chem. 2023;69(11):1322-1323.
• Brown HM, Spies NC, Zaydman MA, et al. A-015 hemoglobin A1c control is an independent predictor of circulating troponin concentrations using machine learning. Am J Clin Pathol. 2023;69, 160(Supplement_1): S141-2.
• Kotnik EN, Mullen MM, Spies NC, et al. Genetic characterization of primary and metastatic high-grade serous ovarian cancer tumors reveals distinct features associated with survival. Commun Biol. 2023;6(1):688.
• Barnell EK, Skidmore ZL, Newcomer KF, et al. Distinct clonal identities of B-ALLs arising after lenolidomide therapy for multiple myeloma. Blood Adv. 2023;7(2):236-245.
• Krysiak K, Danos AM, Saliba J, et al. CIViCdb 2022: evolution of an open-access cancer variant interpretation knowledgebase. Nucleic Acids Res. 2023;51(D1):D1230-D1241.
• Spies NC, Farnsworth CW, Jackups R. Data-driven anomaly detection in laboratory medicine: past, present, and future. J Appl Lab Med. 2023;8(1):162-179.
• Krysiak K, Danos AM, Kiwala S, et al. A community approach to the cancer-variant-interpretation bottleneck. Nat Cancer. 2022;3(5):522-525.
• Gunderson SJ, Puga Molina LC, Spies N, et al. Machine-learning algorithm incorporating capacitated sperm intracellular pH predicts conventional in vitro fertilization success in normospermic patients. Fertil Steril. 2021;115(4):930-939.
• Uppaluri R, Campbell KM, et al. Neoadjuvant and adjuvant pembrolizumab in resectable locally advanced, human papillomavirus-unrelated head and neck cancer: a multicenter, phase II trial [published correction appears in Clin Cancer Res. 2021;27(1):357]. Clin Cancer Res. 2020;26(19):5140-5152.
• Danos AM, Krysiak K, Barnell EK, et al. Standard operating procedure for curation and clinical interpretation of variants in cancer. Genome Med. 2019;11(1):76.
• Barnell EK, Waalkes A, Mosior MC, et al. Open-sourced CIViC annotation pipeline to identify and annotate clinically relevant variants using single-molecule molecular inversion probes. JCO Clin Cancer Inform. 2019;3:1-12.
• Danos AM, Krysiak K, Barnell EK, et al. Standard operating procedure for curation and clinical interpretation of variants in cancer. Genome Med. 2019;11(1):76.